No limit Texas Hold’em is one of the most difficult games to master for many novice and intermediate players for one very simple reason. This is essentially because hold’em is a two card game unlike the four that you have to work with in games like Omaha. So what are the ramifications of playing poker with only two starting cards in your hand? Well it is to do with the frequency of occasions where both you and your opponents hit the flop. In the games that I play in at www.pokerstars.co.uk then I see bluffs and re-bluffs all the time.

Essentially then this is because of the fact that in heads up pots especially that both you and your opponents both know and understand that the other player is not likely to have hit the flop or to have hit it hard. When you know the basic mathematics of hold’em and that an unpaired starting hand will only make a pair one time in three on average then the pot is often won by the player who shows the most aggression. So often then the best games to play in with regard to running multiple successful bluffs are games where your opponents have a fair level of poker knowledge but are not top players.

When you are running multiple barrel bluffs in poker then you essentially do not want two types of player opposing you. The first is the novice who tends to call down weakly either because they overvalue their hand or because they simply like being in action. I have seen many a player attempt this and lose their buy in when their opponent simply called them down and tilt soon followed in many instances.

However you don’t want a really sophisticated player on the other side of the fence either because sophisticated players will soon deduce that you are raising and then betting every street and that players who exhibit these betting patterns tend to only do so with polarised ranges. So these guys will call you down for two reasons, firstly because they have read your bluff and secondly because they have the adequate bankroll to do so.

One of the key factors that affects why many novice poker players fail to make money is in the concept of geometric escalation. This is that an object has the capacity to expand at a much faster rate once it begins the process of expansion. Let me quote an example from a recent game that I played at www.pokerstars.co.uk to explain what I mean. I raised with Q-J after two limpers had come into the pot and both blinds folded with both limpers calling. Each of us had a 100bb stack in what was a full ring NL100 cash game with $0.50-$1.00 blinds.

The pot going into the flop was 18bb (less the rake) and the flop came Q-10-7 rainbow. If I had limped along then the pot would only have been 4.5bb but now a pot sized bet on the flop isn’t 4.5bb but 18bb or so. This means that a re-raise would be committing in terms of stack size and we are only on the flop. This couldn’t have happened had I not raised pre-flop. So we can see then how just one simple pre-flop raise has changed the entire dynamic of the hand. It is for this reason why players need to be very wary of escalating the pot with hands that still have huge potential to lose.

This applies to any hand that you could possibly be dealt pre-flop in no limit hold’em including A-A which after all said and done is still only one pair unless it improves. One of the key ways that players try and stack weaker players is by slowly sucking them into gradually escalating pots. In this hand when the board was Q-10-7 then my hand is more marginal than what it first appears in a pot with 18bb in it and me only having top pair with a mediocre kicker.

In fact if I was to bet this flop and it gets called then I would be very careful from there on in. My opponents checked and I bet 14bb which was called by the initial limper. This made the pot 46bb and a further bet and call on the turn would have possibly led to me losing a lot of blinds if my hand was second best. Had the situation been played out in a limit format then my hand would not have had the same potential weaknesses that it had in no limit.